As a Strategic Marketing advisor, I am in a position to research, review, qualify, propose and ultimately select various types of Marketing Technology. I am not a proponent of Marketing email spam. I DO advocate for relevant and compelling content that is developed and delivered to suspects, prospects, leads and clients who have pro-actively opted-in AND provided detailed areas of interest.
If you use Marketing Technology that supports lead nurturing, there is one very important “no-no” or as the French say “Faux Pas”. Let me explain.
Below is an email that I received from a Marketing Technology company. I had been researching their platform (as well as others) for potential use. As I did my analysis, I detailed the features and functionality that were a “need to have” and a “nice to have”. As an aside – my “nice to have” list usually includes functionality that we may need 2 to 3 years down the road. I also review the pricing model.
As with any good Lead Nurturing campaign – I start receiving content that is supporting my buying journey. After I reviewed the pricing page for one particular vendor – I received this email. Take note that I have blocked out any incriminating information.
This is an internal email generated by their Sale Automation platform to let the salesperson know that I had visited the pricing page.
On a positive note – the internal lead nurture email DID include “suggested” content that the sales person could have sent me in a stand-alone email.
Unfortunately, the sales person decided to simply “click” forward and send me the email (which included the lead scoring information) asking me if I needed any help.
This was a missed opportunity to provide me with a personal touch and personalized content that provided a pricing, feature and functionality comparison for me. Or perhaps some insight about how prospective clients go about making a purchasing decision and things to consider.
Is it foolish of my to expect best-in-class Marketing from Marketing technology vendors? I think not. Needless to say – they did not appear on my one slide overview of platforms that I presented to the C-suite.
